Depaoli focuses on young undocumented immigrant students by analyzing the nonfiction texts: Joshua Davis's "Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream," and Julissa Arce's "My Underground American Dream." In addition, she explores the "Spare Parts" film, and Jose Antonio Vargas' documentary, "Documented." As migration theory has largely failed to recognize the importance of race and racism in the process of migrant integration, her essay incorporates theories that center on dismantling western binaries to create hybrid, new nonlinear, third spaces of subaltern enunciation. Decolonial theory is useful in the examination of the always fluid notion of undocumented immigration. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano's concept of "coloniality of power," Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel's "principle of solidarity," and Latina theorist Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of "Nepantla," provide the theortical frame in DePaoli's analysis.

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